German schoolbooks biased against Israel

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From TheJC:

Textbooks in German schools display a strong political bias against Israel, according to a new report.

It reveals a disturbing trend of blaming Israel for the conflict with the Palestinians.

And it says teachers in German schools tend to shy away from discussing Israel in class because of fears of sparking unmanageable debates.

The report, conducted by the Amadeu Antonio Foundation and the Mideast Freedom Forum, focused on 16 history and politics textbooks used in secondary schools in Berlin and Brandenburg.

The Amadeu Antonio Foundation described textbooks as “inadequate, often one-sided and tendentious” in their depiction of Israel.

It said there is a “different weighting of the victims on the Palestinian and Israeli sides.

“A mostly paraphrased David versus Goliath narrative is dominant. Terrorist attacks and other acts of violence are sometimes played down or ignored.

“Most of the textbooks portray Israel as a war-mongering crisis state and the sole aggressor in the conflict.

“Uprisings and violent attacks on Jewish civilians are given a kind of legitimacy because of the dominant image of Israel.

“The focus of knowledge transfer at school is on the Six Day War, which is also often presented in a distorted way.”

The report says the Second Intifada is “largely ignored in educational material” and there is an “uncritical representation of Hamas” while the failure of the peace process is often blamed on Israel.

Israeli settlement building, construction of the security wall and Israeli rejection of the Palestinian right of return are presented as obstacles to peace.

But Palestinian terror against the Israeli civilian population is not, says the report.  

I'm sure it isn't only Germany.

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The most progressive, liberal, Westernized Palestinians support murdering Jews

Up until Friday night's terror attack in Jerusalem, Mahmoud Abbas usually condemned terror attacks like that - usually at the urging of the US. 

This time, he didn't.

And the Palestinian intelligentsia who are the face of Palestinians to the Western world got the memo. 

Yesterday, we mentioned how angry Noura Erakat was that a TV producer wanted to interview her and ask her reaction to the attack. She refused, but helpfully explained on Twitter that she feels that celebrating the murder of Jews is normal human behavior, and justified the shooting of Jewish civilians as "resistance to apartheid."

Erakat, a lawyer and academic, is one of the most articulate, videogenic propagandists for the Palestinian cause - and she justified terror.

But she wasn't the only one.

At the BBC, Al-Shabaka's Yara Harawi was asked if she agrees that attacks on innocent Israelis makes peace more difficult. After ducking the question, Harawi said, "I reject the premise of the question." Meaning, she couldn't even admit that maybe murdering Israelis outside a synagogue is a bad idea for peace. Only Israelis are responsible for peace - i.e., by surrendering wholesale to Palestinian demands - while Palestinians should have the right to kill Jews without any consequence.

Even more amazing was the answer of Husam Zomlot, head of Palestinian mission to the UK, on Sky News when asked if he condemns the murder of innocent Israelis.

His answer, after trying to dodge? "No." The interviewer asked him a third time to verify that he really doesn't condemn a terror attack, and he mumbled and then tried to weasel out of saying a negative word about murdering Jews, fighting hard to bring the conversation back to how evil Israel is. 

The rest of his answer was telling. He said he won't condemn the attack or even send condolences to the victims' families because Palestinians have been there, done that "all along:" - meaning that Abbas has issued pro forma condemnations for previous terror attacks (after being pressured by Washington) and it didn't help them any, so it is time to end the (obviously) fake condemnations.

This is Palestinian official who is pretty much admitting that all previous condemnations for terror attacks were just meaningless words. More than that, when Palestinian officials used to allow their arms to be twisted to mouth the fake condemnations,  that was considered a major political concession that deserve a quid pro quo - not honest abhorrence at the most sickening terror imaginable. Zomlot has retroactively shown that Palestinians never, ever opposed terror. 

Which we all know is true. As I've shown before, specific mass murder attacks get consistently an 80% approval rating from Palestinians over the years, far higher than the abstract "do you support armed resistance?" questions. The official Palestinian media lionizes terrorists. School textbooks tell students that martyrdom is their highest calling. The PA has said explicitly and repeatedly that paying salaries to terrorists and their families is the absolute highest priority in their budget.

All three of these are spokespeople for the Palestinians in the West, official or unofficial. They are the articulate and attractive face of Palestinian moderation and modernity. And every one of them condoned Jews being slaughtered, explicitly or implicitly. 

Another prominent Palestinian symbol was in the news as well this week, and her story further proves that these examples are not anomalous, but mainstream. 

Susan Abulhawa is a much praised Palestinian American writer and feminist and calls herself a human rights activist. She represents the best face of Palestinians in the West - sensitive, articulate, liberal.

She was locked out from Twitter recently causing a minor uproar among her fans. I do not know what she wrote that violated the rules. 

However, Adin Haykin noticed that in one of her publicity photos she has an interesting picture on the wall of her office.

One of her icons is a terrorist who murdered 13 Israeli children.

Zomlot, Abulhawa, Erakat and Hawari are the most Westernized of Palestinians. They are the face that Palestinians want to show the world so people don't think of them as Islamic extremists (which polls show they are.) 

Yet even these progressive, enlightened Palestinians support terrorism against Israelis and consider murdering Jews to be praiseworthy, not something to be condemned.

Outside of brave Palestinians like Khaled Abu Toameh and Bassem Eid, support for terror is unanimous even among the Palestinians who speak the most and loudest about human rights. 

Likewise, not one Palestinian "human rights" NGO condemned the Jerusalem attack, and several of them or their leaders praised it on social media. 

If the people whose jobs are to whitewash Palestinian extremism to the gullible West are themselves fans of terrorists like Dalal Mughrabi or Khairi Alqam, then it is pretty obvious that Israel isn't the obstacle to peace.

Israel cannot make peace with an bloodthirsty, Jew-hating death cult.  

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Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon! Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.  Read all about it here!

 

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Palestinians in Hebron celebrate the murder of a Jew

There was a heinous terror attack on Saturday night, as a Jewish man and his son went to go shopping at an Arab-owned convenience store. A terrorist shot at them, killing the father and injuring others, and he then shot and seriously injured the medic who came to help the injured.

Here the terrorist is seen being mowed down by an Israeli security guard and then shot dead by another.

A dead Jew is cause for celebration for the Arabs of Hebron. Sweets were handed out, fireworks were shot in the air and cars went out for an impromptu parade.

Terror apologists love to say that Palestinians aren't antisemitic - they are merely exercising the right to "defend themselves. " 

Killing civilians isn't "defense." Celebrating the death of Jewish civilians is pure hate. 

And no one can credibly deny that these celebrations are antisemitism - a hate that the world tolerates from Palestinians.

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Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon! Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.  Read all about it here!

 

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When Scholars and Jewish Leaders Criticize Israel (Daled Amos)

By Daled Amos

Last week, a piece "In Defense of Hamas" appeared in The Amherst Contra, an anonymous student publication at Amherst College. The article whitewashes the terrorist group as "the perennial bogeyman" and defends it against being "consistently portrayed as a terrorist organization". There really is not much more to say about it -- or The Amherst Contra itself, which prides itself on publishing "unpopular opinions," starting this year with "Would We Be Better Off Without Democracy?" But it is an example of the ease with which Israel is condemned on campus.

Unlike that anonymous article, last year, following the outbreak of fighting between Israel and Hamas in May 2021, a letter was circulated with the signatures of rabbinical and cantoral students, decrying the situation in Israel, and blaming Israel:

What will it take for us to see that our Israel has the military and controls the borders? How many Palestinians must lose their homes, their schools, their lives, for us to understand that today, in 2021, Israel’s choices come from a place of power and that Israel’s actions constitute an intentional removal of Palestinians?

These students inform us: "we are future leaders of the Jewish community" -- though that may not be the way most Jews view cantors. For that matter, not every rabbinical student is a future leader of "the Jewish community."

Be that as it may, there is no indication of what grasp, if any, these students have of the full situation in Israel. But even putting aside the question of the depth of their understanding of current events in Israel and of the history -- issues arguably outside their areas of expertise -- there are also the areas that are supposed to be their area of expertise.

Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson, dean of the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies at the American Jewish University in Los Angeles, notes a lack of what one would have expected to find in a letter by rabbinical students and future Jewish leaders:

There wasn’t a word about Ahavat Yisrael – a love and solidarity with our fellow Jews in Israel, with the right of the Jewish people to self-determination in our own homeland, to the very real sacrifices this experiment in Jewish national self-expression has imposed from its inception.

But this vacuum goes beyond Jewish students.

There was also a letter from scholars in Jewish and Israeli studies in response to last year's conflict who condemned Zionism as being

shaped by settler colonial paradigms that saw land settlement as a virtuous means of solving political, economic, or cultural problems, as well as modern European Enlightenment discourses that assumed a hierarchy of civilizations and adopted the premise that technological progress and development of an ‘underdeveloped’ territory would be an unqualified good. [emphasis added]

While they follow this with a passing reference to "the challenges and limitations of applying a settler colonial paradigm to the Zionist case, the unique historical Jewish connection to and presence in the Land of Israel," that does not stop these scholars from accusing Israel of "unsustainable systems of Jewish supremacy." 

Jewish supremacy?

No mention of the ongoing integration of Israeli Arabs in the Israeli military, government and Israeli society in general.

They conclude their letter with the obligatory 

commitment to upholding student and faculty free speech and academic freedom. [emphasis added]

by which they mean a commitment to non-violent protests and boycotts at a time when pro-Israel free speech on campus by students and professors can be dangerous both to one's person and profession.

Both the rabbinical students and these Jewish and Israeli scholars proclaim their Jewishness while attacking Israel, all while at the same time lacking Jewish empathy with Israel. 

In his article The Demise of Jewish Studies in America—and the Rise of Jewish Studies in Israel, Joshua M. Karlip writes about how "American Jewish studies, like American Jewry itself, is fast becoming de-Judaized." Karlip is a professor of Jewish history at YU. He sees this rejection of Jewish particularity as a major contributing factor behind these attacks by Jewish scholars on Israel. Whereas in the past, Europe demanded a "disavowal of Jewish national particularism" in exchange for acceptance, today's academic community demands "the de-Judaization" of their scholarship. 

Karlip claims that part of the problem is that these scholars lack depth in their Jewish background:

Their own often scant Jewish knowledge has abetted this process. With up to 80 percent of contemporary American Jewish scholars not able to read Hebrew sources fluently, is it any wonder that they have adopted the progressive left’s rejection of Zionism and Israel as a “settler colonialism” that displaced “indigenous populations”? If they had bothered to master Hebrew, perhaps they would have studied the Jews who prayed three times a day for the return to Zion rather than the acculturated elites who sought home in Russia, Poland, Germany, and France.

What they are missing, he writes, is what makes it possible for Jews from Morocco, Yemen, Ethiopia and Russia to make aliyah and bond together with an Israeli identity, which is "more than a 'constructed,' 'invented' identity."

Without that consciousness of our own nativeness in the Holy Land, of a people exiled and yearning to return home, the national culture, language, and civil society of Israel would not exist, let alone thrive, today. 

Writing in May 2021, Ruth Wisse gives another example of Jewish scholars who de-Judaize in their scholarship, in this case seeing Jewish self-perpetuation and continuity as nothing more than an exercise in corrupt male power. She quotes from The History and Sexual Politics of an American Jewish Communal Project to illustrate her point:

A Jewish continuity paradigm emerged forcefully in the 1970s as a set of expert pronouncements and community policies that treated women and their bodies as data points in service of a particular vision of Jewish communal survival...Condemning intermarriage and decrying low child-bearing rates became signature features of the affective work of Jewish communal research. [emphasis added]

As Wisse describes this approach, "every sensible Jewish communal initiative to encourage Jewish marriage, family, and education as the sustaining features of Diaspora survival is defined as a suspect tool of indoctrination."

Again, Jewish particularity is rejected with a total apathy for the richness of Jewish life, history and culture.

But what are we supposed to make of this "free speech" and "academic freedom" that the scholars above claim to support in the context of their condemnation of Israel and its alleged crimes? Is academic freedom just a variety of free speech for scholars?

According to an article this year in The New Republic, academic freedom not only covers research and teaching, but also statements that scholars make outside of that ("extramural utterances") -- for instance on social media.

The point is that academic freedom of expression is an extension of their recognized expertise and competence in their field, which is why what they outside of academia -- what they say publicly -- gets respect. But by the same token, shouldn't they be held responsible when they go off the rails? 

For instance:

the AAUP (American Association of University Professors) has consistently held that faculty should not be fired for extramural speech unless that speech calls into question a professor’s fitness to serve. Ordinarily, that speech has to bear directly on the faculty member’s field of study. The idea is that a historian who is a Holocaust denier is obviously unfit, whereas an electrical engineer who is a Holocaust denier is just a crank. This position makes perfect sense, though few people realize that it entails the unsettling corollary that professors enjoy greater protection for extramural speech when they have no idea what they’re talking about than for speech within the areas of their research and teaching. (emphasis added)

And academics who talk and write outside of their field of expertise -- and say outrageous things, are not all that hard to find.

One example of this is Joy Karega:

Karega was a professor of rhetoric and composition who promoted a panoply of antisemitic conspiracy theories, including the claims that ISIS is a CIA/Mossad front and that the 2015 Islamist attack on the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo was in fact a false flag operation conducted by Israel. Both were rightly determined to be in the ballpark of Holocaust-denying historians.

Sure enough, Oberlin College originally defended Karega on free speech grounds, and only months later finally fired her.

But what about less blatant examples of academics going outside their area of expertise?

Phyllis Chesler wrote last year about how Academics Use Propaganda, Not Expertise, to Bash Israel. She describes an open letter by Palestinian Feminist Collective, claiming that "once again, Palestinians from the far north to the far south of our homeland are defying settler colonialism's attempts to partition the land and the people." Academic feminists enthusiastically joined in with a statement that ignored both facts and context. Chesler writes:

Subsequently, academic feminists, issued a statement "In Solidarity With Palestinian Feminist Collective," which links to non-scholarly boilerplate propaganda, none of which is concerned with the Islamic gender apartheid that afflicts Arab Palestinian women in Israel, Gaza, and on the West Bank. They focus on "evictions in East Jerusalem" without understanding the history, legality, or nature of this dispute.

...The gender studies people link to facts about the "humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip," which fail to acknowledge that Israel left Gaza in 2005. Whatever the situation there may be, it is due to Hamas's greed, corruption, and terrorist goals.

Dear God: How is it possible to claim that "Palestine is a feminist issue," which they do, without even mentioning forced child marriage, forced veiling, and honor killing – which are indigenous customs – not caused by the alleged Israeli occupation?

Chesler describes how she took a random sample of 1 professor at 10 gender, women's studies and sexuality departments and found only one professor who even addressed the issue of honor killing -- and even then, only to attack Trump and Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

But none of these randomly chosen 10 have an advanced degree in the history and nature of the Middle East, the Arab World, Islam, Judaism, or Israel. None are teaching courses in such areas as experts. They are merely using their expert credentials to support propaganda. [emphasis added]

But spreading propaganda in the guise of academic scholarship is not limited to feminist academics. Chesler points to "Palestine and Praxis: Scholars for Palestinian Freedom," an open letter featuring 70 pages of signatories with about 45 names on each page. The signers claim to be "scholars" who identify with "the Palestinian struggle as an indigenous liberation movement confronting a settler colonial state." These "scholars" call for "boycott campaigns – and to anti-Israel campus activism and to "pressure (their) government to end funding Israeli military aggression."

But...

Guess what? Only 11 of the first 450 signatories teach in Middle East, Palestine, and Arabic Studies.

Both the feminist academics and the "scholars" are recycling Palestinian Islamist propaganda and trying to pass it off as scholarly opinion. Do not fall for it. [emphasis added]

This is not just an issue of academics and scholars going outside of their areas of expertise. There is an issue of a lack of objectivity and the pursuit of personal agendas. As Menachem Kellner, who teaches philosophy and Jewish thought at Shalem College writes, the concept of academic freedom is being abused:

the concept of “academic freedom” is meant to enable academics to research and teach evidence-based truths in the fields in which they are competent. It is not meant to protect academics who introduce their personal politics into their research and teaching in order to browbeat their students and foment an atmosphere of prejudice and hate designed to silence rational inquiry.

Such academics share responsibility for the atmosphere of fear that Jewish students suffer on college campuses.

Jews have all kinds of opinions about Israel, and are certainly free to express them -- so does anyone else for that matter. But the fact that someone is Jewish doesn't mean he knows what he is talking about. Jewish scholars are free to condemn Israel, but in turn, we are free to question their motives and agenda, and even whether they really have the expertise to back up what they claim. The same applies to any scholar who signs on to a condemnation of Israel -- we can question what agenda they or their group is pursuing.

And we should.

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Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon! Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.  Read all about it here!

 

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Abbas pretends to fight terror, this week at least

Suddenly, after weeks of his Fatah party taking responsibility and bragging about terror attacks, Mahmoud Abbas' Palestinian Authority arrested Hamas terrorist Mosab Shtayyeh in Nablus.

This caused Palestinian fans of terror to protest in Nablus and Jenin, and Hamas condemned the arrest.

Meanwhile, the Palestinian Authority also confiscated a cache of weapons in Hebron, plus "the arrest of a number of outlaws and instigators of sedition and security chaos in the Hebron Governorate."

So what's going on? Why is the PA suddenly acting how it is supposed to when it has been openly supportive of terror recently?

The reason is that Mahmoud Abbas is in New York this week to give a speech at the UN. He has been under pressure from the US and Israel to flex his muscles against terror, and he doesn't want to look bad when he gives his annual anti-Israel speech to the world.

Next week, we'll find out if this is a real change or just optics. My bet is the latter.

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Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon! Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.  Read all about it here!

 

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A reminder of how fully Palestinians supported Al Qaeda, Osama Bin Laden and suicide bombings on 9/11 - and long after

This video shows, for a painful 100 seconds, how happy Palestinians were upon hearing that thousands of Americans had been murdered by Al Qaeda 21 years ago today.

But Palestinian support for Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden and suicide bombings remained high even as Arab countries turned against them.

This Pew Research graphic shows that Palestinians were more enthusiastic about Al Qaeda than citizens of any Arab country, and while their support waned over the years, they continued to be the most extreme supporters of terror among Arabs in the decade following 9/11.

In 2014, the most recent poll I can find, Palestinian Arabs were most supportive among world Muslims towards suicide bombings - by far.

And even then, three years after Osama Bin Laden was killed, a huge proportion of Palestinians continued to support Al Qaeda - more than any other Muslims:

One doesn't see questions about suicide bombings and support for Bin Laden being asked by international pollsters any more, possibly because they make Palestinians look so bad. But even this year, a majority of Palestinians support "armed attacks" against Israeli civilians, and there is little reason to think that they distinguish between "martyrdom operations" and any other attacks on Jewish civilians. 

Bin Laden lives on - in Palestinians.

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Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon! Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.  Read all about it here!

 

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@HRW and @FranceskAlbs defend a convicted terrorist as a fellow "human rights defender"

From Human Rights Watch:

 Israeli authorities should immediately release the French-Palestinian human rights worker Salah Hamouri from administrative detention and reverse the decision to revoke his residency status in his native Jerusalem, Human Rights Watch said today.

...The military courts based their decisions to detain him on secret information they allege points to Hamouri’s involvement in the activities of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a Palestinian political movement with an armed wing. 

UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese tweeted, "French-Palestinian Salah Hammouri is a human rights defender who has been persecuted for years. Israel may call him a 'terrorist' but the reality says otherwise. "

Let's look at reality.

HRW used to mention that the PFLP does not distinguish between its terror and "political" wings. Now it treats it as a political organization - even though nothing has changed.

The PFLP's own political platform explicitly supports terror: "It it is a natural right, and duty that the Palestinian people should defend itself, resist the occupation through various means of struggle, including armed struggle. ..[T]he form of armed struggle should be dealt with at each stage as a means to serve the inclusive political vision which is responsible for determining the function to be done at each stage of the struggle..."

And the PFLP still engages in terror. They were responsible for the murder of Rina Shnerb in 2019.

There is no doubt that Hamouri is a member of the PFLP, even though HRW says it is "alleged."  Here is an article (archived) from the PFLP website that calls him a "comrade" and notes that he planned to assassinate the Chief Rabbi of Israel - and he justified it years afterwards.

Comrade Salah Hamouri, the former Palestinian prisoner freed as part of the prisoner exchange on December 18, 2011, said upon his release that “there is no option for the Palestinian people except resistance, because it is the only way for us to achieve our people’s rights, our freedom, and our self-determination.”

He served nearly seven years in Israeli prison, charged with planning to assassinate Ovadia Yosef, the leader of the Shas party and the Chief Rabbi of Israel. “This man is and will remain a symbol of racism and fanaticism in Israel,” Hamouri said.

And when he says "resistance," he means murdering Jews. 

A PFLP envoy to Cuba claimed the organization supports human rights - and one of those human rights is to murder Israeli Jews. 

We reaffirm our commitment to our goals, principles and inalienable Palestinian national rights. Some of these have been recognized and approved by the norms, principles, conventions, international resolutions, international law and human rights. The first of these rights is the right of the Palestinian people to resist the occupation by all means and methods.

"All means and methods" means terrorism. And its main website is filled with praise and support for terror attacks. 

The PFLP is a terrorist organization. It is designated as such by the US, EU, Canada and other countries. No major Western nation distinguishes between a "political party" and "armed wing." Neither does the PFLP itself. This was something apparently created by Human Rights Watch.

But "human rights" leaders are claiming that this convicted and admitted terrorist, who calls for violence, is a "human rights defender." Which indicates that they subscribe to the PFLP philosophy that the first and most important human right is to murder Jews. 

(h/t GnasherJew)

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Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon! Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.  Read all about it here!

 

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